README.mdown

Introduction

FeedParser is an NSXMLParser-based RSS/Atom feed parser for Cocoa. It is
intended to parse well-formed RSS and Atom feeds on both the desktop and the
iPhone.

Usage

The simplest way to use FeedParser is to simply add the FeedParser directory
to your project. FeedParser also includes a static library target if you
prefer to include it that way.

Design Goals

FeedParser was designed to parse valid RSS and Atom feeds, including support
for extensions outside of the RSS or Atom namespaces. All parsed feeds MUST be
well-formed, but the parser may or may not enforce validity.

Current State

As of this writing, FeedParser can parse a full valid RSS 2.0 feed, though it
intentionally skips elements that I did not consider useful. The parser may be
extended later to expose the values of those elements. FeedParser has only a
limited understanding of Atom feeds. It can understand a handful of Atom
elements embedded within an RSS feed, but it cannot understand a complete Atom
feed. Full understanding of Atom feeds is one of the future goals of this
project.

FeedParser requires that the entire feed must be a well-formed XML document,
but it does not do any validity checking of individual elements.

Future Development

The goals for future development of FeedParser are the following:

Fully support Atom feeds

Be as lenient as possible. To this extent, parsing non-well-formed documents
should be investigated. NSXMLParser is documented as aborting parsing upon
encountering an error, but in practice it appears that, at least on Mac OS X
10.5, it actually can recover from errors. However, at the current time
FeedParser explicitly aborts the parser when an error is encountered

Support the more common RSS/Atom extensions

Better error reporting

Naming Issues

The name FeedParser conflicts with RSS/Atom parsers for other languages. A new
name unique name should be chosen that is available on Google Code for bug
reporting purposes.